


I'll Be Your Mirror

by truebeasts



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:02:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3210152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truebeasts/pseuds/truebeasts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The only ones who turn out worse than my boyfriends are my ex-boyfriends."</p>
<p>Or, Ingenue asks for a favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Be Your Mirror

Ingenue was sitting at her vanity when her phone buzzed, and the sound made her heart skip a beat.  Still, she made herself wait before she touched it, finish curling her hair.  She’d lightened it recently, just a little—not something a casual observer would notice, but when she stood with the light behind her, the sun would catch her highlights as if she was wearing a crown, or a halo.

She set the curling iron down and touched the phone.

_Amy Dallon just arrived. In infirmary._

Ingenue smiled.  The message was from that thrall of Teacher’s that worked the dimensional transfer machine. Was his name Victor? She couldn’t remember, and she hadn’t bothered to enter it into her phone.

_Thanks, xoxo_ , she wrote back.

She looked across the pictures she’d taped across the top of her mirror.   Actresses, a few pin-up models. And one superheroine, her white cape held out with one arm as if to offer her protection, the sun glinting on the tines of her tiara.

Ingenue studied herself in the mirror.  Smiled. There, yes.  That confidence in her smile, the sureness of someone who knows that she can compel love.  Like a cat that bats a mouse between its paws, but doesn’t kill it.

They weren’t so different.  In some ways.

She’d change her dress before she went down, she thought.  She didn’t need to look like she was hurrying.

 

-

_Chantal paused in front of a shop window and use the wavering reflection in the darkened glass to check her appearance. She didn’t need to look like she was hurrying, but she couldn’t help but giggle when she thought of what she was about to do.  It was fifteen minutes to midnight, and she’d already broken her curfew.  But it would be worth it, even if her parents caught her._

_In the alley, just like he’d said, there was a dumpster set just under the fire escape.  Getting to the top of the dumpster was tricky, and it almost made her wish she’d worn sensible shoes instead of her high heels, but once she was there it was simple enough to grab the lowest rung of the fire escape ladder and pull herself up.  Once she was on the first landing, she stepped gingerly to keep the metal from creaking underfoot.  It was a long climb. She kept expecting someone to look out a window and see her, shout, but every window that she climbed past was dark._

_She reached the roof and she waited. Ten minutes, by her watch. If he wasn’t running late._

_She wasn’t really dressed for the weather.  She shivered._

_It was twenty minutes later that she saw his silhouette appear over the rooftops. A lone flier, trailing ribbons of smoke or fog.  She was impatient, and she was cold, but when he lighted on the rooftop she made herself control her shivering and smile._

_“Hey, supervillain,” she said. “Running late from your last heist?”_

 

-

 

The corridors of Teacher’s compound were busy with students hurrying back and forth, their movements crisp and precise, like clockwork, and there was a flatness to their faces, as if she was seeing their features pressed against a glass pane, distorted.  It _crawled_ over them, that warping effect, and in its wake she saw strings of numbers, ghostly faces, diagrams and calculations. Nothing that she could reach out to. Nothing that she even slightly wanted to touch.

Teacher’s power.  They might as well be wooden dolls, as real as they felt to her.

She was surrounded by puppets.  Sometimes the boredom of it made her ache.

Then there was Satyr, coming towards her down the hallway.  He stood out from the white-clad students, both in the way he dressed and in other ways.  The other that inhabited him, his power, was wrapped around him like a cloak, half-naked, grinning, its features constantly shifting from male to female, mouth open to reveal a long, pointed tongue.  Faun-like.  Appropriate.

She wondered if it was the way he imagined himself.  Perhaps he’d never guessed at the laughing thing he had living inside him, beside him.

He caught her wrist as she passed, and she smiled up at his doubled face.

“Who are you stalking today, Ingenue?”

A moue. “I’m offended that you put it that way. I’m not stalking anyone.”

“Funny. I heard Amelia Dallon just entered the base.”

“I can’t say hello to a friend?”

He looked at her with a raised eyebrow, and she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek.

“Don’t be mean to me, Satyr.  What have I ever done to you?”

He shook his head, exasperated, but his other self was smiling.  She could feel its warmth beating against her wrist, where he was touching her.  She could just _push,_ with her power, and then…but that wasn’t what she was here for, not now.  She stepped around him, twisting her arm so that she broke his hold. He stepped in front of her again.

“I suppose no one can say you don’t do your job enthusiastically.”

It was one of the things that Teacher had hired her for.  Work with Amelia.  Push her limits around the shards.

He’d probably hoped that Ingenue’s presence would keep the girl coming back, as well.

Ingenue sighed.

“I’m _bored,_ Satyr. I like you, but even you’re a little bit boring.”

“I like my mind the way it is.”

“Do you?” She watched him, curious, and his other self shifted restlessly inside his skin.  But he didn’t answer.

“I like _her_ mind the way it is, too, whatever Teacher thinks.  Mostly because I like being alive.”

She gave him the smile she’d been practicing in her mirror.  Radiant.  That was the word.

“Don’t worry, Satyr.  I’ll be _perfect_.”

 

-

 

_“I’ll be perfect, Spectre. Perfect.  I promise.”_

_He hadn’t wanted to let her ride along, but Chantal had begged, and she could tell that he was relenting. It was one thing to skip her curfew or sneak out of school, meet him in some prearranged place and let him take her back to his lair, but he always had work to do or somewhere to be and she was almost sure that he had other girls, as well._

_The new girl on his team, for instance. Chantal could tell that she was pretty, under her mask._

_She let him teach her how to shoot a gun.  She wasn’t a cape, but she didn’t have to be useless.  She wasn’t useless, she knew.  Whatever he might say when he was angry with her._

_She knew he didn’t mean it. Not really._

_Now she was on a rooftop across from the warehouse, and he was going over the details one last time._

_“Just don’t fuck up, Chantal,” he said. “This should be an easy job.”_

_“Don’t worry.” She checked the gun under her arm. “Everything will be perfect.”_

_But it wasn’t._

_There shouldn’t have been any other capes in the building.  The plan was to hit the warehouse, disable the underlings, take the drugs and the money, and run. Simple.  They had the rest of the team for backup._

_And then she was on the ground, and she’d lost her gun, and she didn’t know what the other cape’s power was, but it drained the strength from her limbs and made it so that she could barely move.  She could hear Spectre screaming.  The new girl was dead._

_There was nothing she could have done differently.  Still, she knew that it was all her fault.  All her fault._

_She put her hands over her face and she saw universes._

 

-

 

Amelia wasn’t in the infirmary, despite what Teacher’s guard had said. She’d wandered down the corridor beyond it and was staring out of the windows that opened onto Teacher’s gardens and training grounds.  Neatly tended, all of it.  Everything in its place.

“No work today, Amelia? I didn’t think you liked it here enough to come just to visit.”

The girl started.  “Oh. Ingenue.”

Amelia didn’t smile, but Ingenue could see the way the tension eased from her shoulders, as if she’d been holding her breath and had finally let it out.

“Well?” she asked.  “News from Marquis?”

“I do have work,” Amelia said.

Ingenue slouched against the window beside her, pretending to pout.

“I thought you were here to see me.”

“That too.” She was still looking out over the gardens.  “Teacher asked if I could work on more power alterations.  Practice on his students.”

Ingenue waited, watching her.  Watching her other, her passenger.  It wrapped itself around her, moving under her skin, between her tattoos.  Blood red, bone white, restless and changing. Forming and reforming itself so quickly she could barely catch more than a glimpse, and so bright that it almost hurt to look.

There was a face there, though, and its eyes looked through Amelia’s. They changed, too. A shark’s eyes, a lion’s, a doe’s.

“I told him no,” Amelia said, without looking up from where her tattooed hand pressed against the glass of the windowpane.  She was missing fingers.  It wasn’t the first time that Ingenue had noticed. 

“Why not?” she asked.

The girl shook her head, and her other manifested a set of spidery limbs that caressed her face and covered her eyes.

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“You do the new triggers,” said Ingenue.  “Put them back together when their power tears them apart.”

“That’s different. This is just…experimenting. They’re people. He’s asking me to do things that would change their personalities.  Maybe irrecoverably.”

Ingenue smiled.  “So? What do you think Teacher’s power does? They’re probably used to it, by now.”

A student appeared from the infirmary door.  A long face, and eyes that looked painted open.  Ingenue stared at him until he closed the door.

“You know, I bet you could undo the loyalty effect of his power, if you wanted. Wouldn’t that be interesting?”

Amelia stared at her.

“You work for him.”

“For now. I’m getting a bit tired of it, to be honest.  I’m starting to wonder if there’s ever going to be anything in it for me.” She put her hand over Amelia’s, where it was pressed against the glass.  The girl looked at her.

“You’re too old for me, you know.”

Ingenue laughed.  “I’m not that much older than you are.  Not really. I was only—what, nineteen? When they put me in the Birdcage.”

That was close enough to the truth, anyway.  She smiled.  She knew she had the smile right when Amelia looked away.  Guiltily.

She’d downloaded all the interviews the healer had given, in her other life. Read through them at night, when she didn’t want to sleep.  One of Teacher’s hackers had done her a favor, and she’d gained access to other information, as well.  The kind that was supposed to be classified.

She knew what Amelia had done to her sister.

“I was only a little bit older than you, when I went in.”

“I volunteered, though.  You didn’t.”

“I know. Why?”

Amelia looked at her hands.  She had more ink than bare skin on them, now, and her other seemed to lap at the tattoos with a dozen insubstantial tongues.

“I didn’t know how to live with what I’d done.  But I knew I had to go on living.  So that I wouldn’t forget her.”

“Poor baby.” Ingenue leaned close to her, kissed her forehead.  Amelia jumped.

But her other curled around her, like a cat being stroked.  Ingenue could feel its warmth on her face.

She looked out the window, her hand on Amelia’s shoulder.

“You should have seen what I did to my first boyfriend.”

Amelia seemed to draw into herself.

“That’s not funny.”

“No. It’s really not.”

But that didn’t keep her from smiling.

 

-

_There wasn’t much left of him when the PRT surrounded the safe house—although Ingenue hadn’t stayed to see that part._

_She called herself Ingenue, now._

_Poor Spectre._

_By the end it was as if he was barely flesh at all.  Just the shadow body of his other, eager to be shaped under her fingers.  It was hard for her to even see his face, during the last days, and when they were in bed what she felt was the cool, electric touch of the other._

_Not him, really. Not anymore._

_But she knew he wouldn’t be able to hide from the Protectorate forever.  Not with what he’d been doing._

_Besides, she was tired of the sound of his voice.  He’d tried to eat the fingers of the last man he killed, and when she’d stopped him, he’d raved about a garden of flesh and the end of the world._

_At least he didn’t call her names anymore._

_She told herself that she still loved him, and she was fairly certain that it was even true._

_Later, she’d find out that she always loved them.  Even the ones she’d used out of pure necessity.  Even at the end._

 

-

 

“Walk with me,” she said to Amelia, taking her by the arm.  The girl flinched a little, again, when she touched her bare skin, but Ingenue didn’t move her hand.

She did wonder what Amelia saw when she touched her.  What her own mind looked like where her passenger joined itself to her.

“Did Teacher send you to persuade me?”  Amelia asked. “Because I don’t—”

“Don’t be silly.  I came on my own. I wanted to ask you for something, actually.”

“What is it?” Her expression, when she glanced at Ingenue, was suspicious.

“Do you know you look a lot like your father, sometimes?” asked Ingenue. It was true, in the essentials. Physically.  Although Marquis’s other was restrained, quick but solemn, a creature of lace and bone that was nothing like his daughter’s. “You’re not as polite as he is, though.”

“It’s weird when you talk about him like that.” 

“You mean it makes me seem old?  I’m offended. I’m not even thirty.”

“You didn’t answer my question.” Amelia was clenching and unclenching her hand, counting off the missing fingers with her thumb.  She probably thought Ingenue wouldn’t notice.

“I know. I’m thinking.  It’s not always easy to ask for a favor.” She glanced at Amelia sidelong. “Especially when you act like you don’t trust me.”

“I don’t.”

But her other plucked at Ingenue’s hand with a dozen tiny paws. Their claws pricked. Not unpleasantly.

“You should. Trust me.  I don’t want bad things to happen to you.”

“Is that what you say to everyone?”

“Sometimes. Not always.  Some people like bad things.”

“Where are we going?”  Her lips—her real lips, not her other’s—were pressed in a thin, worried line.

Ingenue shook her head.

“Nowhere bad, Amy.  Amelia. Trust me just a little.”

The corridors in Teacher’s compound were painted white, windowless, for the most part, a bunker painted in hospital colors.  As featureless as his students.  It was the kind of place that it was easy to get lost in, but Ingenue knew her way.

She reached her room, and she opened the door.  Amelia stood in front of it, unmoving.

Ingenue pushed her, a little.

“Inside, silly.”

“This is your room.”

“It is.”

She’d left clothes strewn across her bed when she went to find Amelia. Now she gathered them up and tossed them over the chair in front of her vanity.  Amelia was looking at her cosmetics.  She picked up a bottle of perfume and sniffed it. 

Ingenue arranged herself on her chaise longue, against the far wall, and watched her.

“You can put some on, if you want.”

“No, I—” Amelia grimaced, and then she looked at the photos taped across the top of the vanity, and dropped the bottle.

The broken glass filled the room with the scent of jasmine.

“You realize that they don’t make that scent anymore?  I don’t know where I’m going to get another bottle.”

“Fuck,” said Amelia.  “Fuck.”

She swiped a hand across her eyes, and looked at Ingenue.  Her face was pale.  Her other was roiling beneath her skin.

“You—you _wanted_ me to see that.”

“Mm-hm.” She crossed her legs on the chaise and tilted her head.  She could see the way that Amelia was shaking, tucking her chin into her chest as if she could disappear. “I want you to do me a favor.”

“No. Fuck you.”  She took the picture of Glory Girl off the mirror and ripped it in half.  “You don’t get to have this.”

“Amelia.” The girl looked at her, as if despite herself.

“Come here.” She patted the cushion beside her. “Sit.”

For a moment, she thought Amelia might turn and leave.  But when she moved her legs took her towards Ingenue. She didn’t sit. She leaned over her, one hand braced against the back of the chaise.  Close enough that Ingenue thought that if she turned her head, she’d brush the bare skin of her arm with her cheek.

“What do you _want_ , Ingenue?”

“I want you to use your powers.  Like Teacher suggested.  Change the way a brain interacts with its shard.  If you’re afraid of doing it blind, I can help you.”

Amelia let out her breath.  “I asked you if Teacher sent you to—”

Ingenue cut her off. 

“I want you to start with me.”

 

-

_She’d cut the tracker out of her arm, but they’d simply put it back in.  They’d taken away her phone.  She had the walls of her room to look at, and no one to talk to, and they’d made the room comfortable enough considering that it was the end of the world, but it wasn’t what she wanted._

_Her mind kept running back through her memories of the battle. Chevalier by her side, his power pliant under her hands.  The way he’d stepped in front of her when that golden beam fell on them._

_The way he’d aimed his cannonblade at her when she’d appeared beside his hospital bed._

_“I want you to be acceptable,” he’d said._

_It wasn’t fair. She hadn’t done anything. Just what she’d had to do, to survive._

_She was fairly certain that that was true.  It felt like she was dying now._

_There was one thing that she wanted, and she couldn’t have him._

_She sat down in front of her mirror._

_She never saw her own passenger when she looked at herself.  Just her face. She barely registered other people’s faces anymore._

_They looked like masks to her. Empty.  Waiting to be filled by another self, that would look out through each one’s eyes._

_Her face looked the same way._

 

-

 

“What?” Amelia was staring at her.

“I do know how my powers work, Amelia.  Everyone keeps reminding me.  I know exactly what they do to me, and to the people I use them on.”

Amelia was still standing in front of her.  Staring.

“Sit.”

She sat.

“Give me your hand.”

Amelia shook her head.

“I can’t do it without changing your personality.”

Ingenue laughed softly.  “I’m used to that.”

She could see Amelia’s throat working as she swallowed.  When she spoke, it was very quietly.

“I kind of like your personality.  Even though you’re a sadistic bitch sometimes.”

“So keep the parts that you like.  I don’t mind.”

“You’re being kind of…cavalier about this.”

Ingenue watched her.  She was sitting with her head bent, knees drawn up to her chest, her other—her passenger—spilling out of her skin like an open wound.  Close enough to touch, if she only reached out.  But what could she say?

_I know what you did to your sister. You changed her and you lost her._

_I’ve been thinking about it for a long time._

_I’m not afraid of losing myself again._

_You can make me into her, if you want to._

Ingenue laced her fingers together in her lap.

“How do you think I should be?”

“Scared,” said Amelia.  “I’m scared.”

“Trust me,” said Ingenue, and she held out her hands.  “I know what I want.  I always do.”

Amelia put her hands out, her fingertips just touching Ingenue’s.

And Ingenue smiled.  It was Victoria’s smile. The one that she’d practiced. She saw Amelia’s mouth quirk up, despite herself.

“Don’t worry,” she said.  “You have a couple tries to get it right.”

**Author's Note:**

> Some readers may notice that there are some setting similarities between this story and my longer one, Dragon Unbound. This story is canon for that one, although you can also read them separately.


End file.
